Southern California transplant Christina Wynter has fun with Gnash, the mascot of the Nashville Predators hockey team. Wynter, diagnosed with cancer in 2014 and told she might only have six months to live, decided to move to Nashville to continue her treatment and spend whatever time she had left following her favorite team in hopes they someday win the Stanley Cup. (Photo courtesy of Christina Wynter)

That’s not just a sports cliché wrapped in the hype of the ongoing National Hockey League championship playoffs that has her team trailing the Pittsburgh Penguins, 3-2, going into Sunday’s elimination game.

Back in 2014 when Wynter learned she had advanced cancer and might live only another six months, she decided she wasn’t dying at least until she watched the Predators hoist the Stanley Cup.

She told her dumbfounded oncologist as much.

“The oncologist said, ‘What? What does that mean?’”

This: Wynter wanted to see every Predators home game that she could, while she could.

So Wynter left behind family and friends in Southern California at the start of the 2015 hockey season to move to Nashville, a town she had visited only one time previously, on a three-day trip in her pre-cancer days to catch the Preds’ last home game of the 2013 season.

At 33, Wynter lives alone in a secondhand trailer bought with about $7,000 in winnings from a TV game show. Her cancer fight continues through two failed treatments and now a promising clinical trial at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville. Being able to immerse herself in the destiny of the Predators keeps her going, she says.

“Moving here was a good decision because I get to be close to my beloved team.”

It delighted her to see Nashville beat Anaheim’s team in the Western Conference final.

“Oh, I loved it,” Wynter says. “I’m sorry, but I hate the Ducks.”

Her home, with its interior walls painted in the blue and gold colors of the Predators and a room decorated with memorabilia, is located at a trailer park in what she describes as a not-so-nice part of Music City. She’s too weak to work, but is taking an online course in computer coding. She gets by OK on disability, with the hospital heavily discounting her treatment.

Wynter’s season ticket with the Predators is purchased on an installment plan — her only luxury at $107 a month. Jumping up to cheer for her team leaves her dizzy and out-of-breath, but Wynter couldn’t be happier sitting in her perch above the ice in Section 302, Row B, Seat 12 at Bridgestone Arena, said to be the loudest professional hockey rink in the United States.

“I’m surrounded by people who all want the same thing,” she says by phone. “It feels like a home away from home. Every time you turn a corner, there’s people you know.”

She’s made friends with other fans, food servers, security personnel, the folks who do on-ice presentations.

Wynter was born in Dallas but her family moved to Southern California when she was 7. Her parents, who are from Taiwan, divorced two years later. She spent her adolescence with her father in Orange County and graduated from Cypress High in 2002. After high school, she attended UC Riverside for a couple of years, then dropped out and moved to Harbor City in Los Angeles County, with her mother, Cindy Shaw.

Shaw was stunned when her only daughter told her about her plans to live in Nashville. “It was right after she had radiation on her brain. The doctor was not even sure it would work or not,” says Shaw, who is still raising the youngest of her two sons.

Wynter moved across country a month later, having researched treatment options at Vanderbilt-Ingram and with a referral from her doctor. Going to parts unknown didn’t daunt Wynter, a heavy metal music fan who had toured selling merchandise for bands.

Shaw, who has also become a hockey fan, believes the Predators work like a tonic on her daughter.

“It’s a purpose. With this hockey team on her mind, she always has something to look forward to, instead of lying there thinking, I’m dying, I’m dying.”

An aspiring pastry chef, Wynter says she had just graduated from Le Cordon Bleu culinary institute in Pasadena when she was diagnosed with lung cancer. A cough that had persisted for two years — something doctors alternatively told her could be caused by allergies, asthma or acid reflux — turned out to be the symptom of a rare form of cancer.

Beyond a tumor the size of her fist lodged in her lung, the cancer had spread to other parts of Wynter’s 120-pound body, including her brain. When she was hospitalized, she asked her mother to bring her three things from home: her toothbrush, her contact lens kit and her Predators jersey, which hung on her emaciated 5-foot-5 frame by the time she left the hospital at 90 pounds.

But during time spent at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Carson undergoing radiation and chemotherapy, Wynter streamed Predators games on her cellphone using the hospital’s sketchy WiFi.

“Back then everything was so bleak,” she recalls. “I felt like I was dying. The only things I could look forward to were my mom’s visits and Preds’ games.”

Her then-boyfriend, a Chicago Blackhawks fan, had introduced her to hockey in 2012. She loved the sport for the same reasons many hockey fans do: “There was something about the speed and grace and violence of the game that just drew me in.”

And that “yellow team,” as she first identified the Predators because of their jerseys, captured her imagination — especially goalie Pekka Rinne, a Finnish player dubbed “Peks.”

“He is so amazing,” Wynter says. “His reaction time is insane. He makes these stops you would not expect a human to be able to make.”

Wynter is easy to spot at the games.

Just ask Mark Hollingsworth, the guy known as “The Warden of Cellblock 303,” a nickname that stems from his regular spot in Section 303, aka the Cellblock, where he leads chants to rev up the home crowd and taunts to deflate opponents.

Hollingsworth first spied this chick in a canary yellow wig, blue felt kitty-cat ears attached, in the hallways at Bridgestone. She was always smiling. He knew right away: another crazy fan of the Predators.

“It was kind of hard to miss her because she would have that wig on. I kind of wondered what that was all about,” says Hollingsworth, who does radio marketing for a Nashville nonprofit. “I didn’t realize she was wearing the wig because she was bald underneath from chemotherapy.”

They are friends now. He got to know her backstory when the Predators hosted the 2016 NHL All-Star Game. The Canadian sports network TSN wanted to interview local fans with compelling tales, so Hollingsworth posted an announcement on the Cellblock 303 Facebook page. Wynter responded and more people learned about her journey.

Just this past week, her story found a wider audience after a local Nashville news channel did a feature on Wynter that generated what Hollingsworth, who was again the source of the news tip, estimated at tens of thousands of views. Then it caught the eye of a Yahoo Sports writer and more well wishes poured in.

Says Hollingsworth: “Everybody right now that knows her is like, oh, if the Predators can just do this, just for her, that would be such a wonderful thing.”

Wynter, who in hindsight wishes she had acted sooner to find the cause of that persistent cough, says she hopes what happened to her can serve as a cautionary tale.

“I feel like if I can use my story to warn people to not take their health for granted, as kind of a lesson to other people, my life has meaning.”

Her second round of chemo considerably shrunk her tumors and, with the clinical trial drug she’s been on for a little over a year, Wynter says only a tumor between her lungs remains. Nobody is saying anything about being cured, so she is reconciled to taking the drug until it stops working and then seeing what other options she has.

Her attitude remains upbeat, especially when it comes to her favorite team, whose 2017 Stanley Cup hopes could be dashed with a loss on Sunday.

Theresa Walker is a Southern California native who has been a staff writer at The Orange County Register since 1992. She specializes in human interest stories and social issues, such as homelessness. She also covers nonprofits and philanthropy in Orange County. She loves telling stories about ordinary people who do the extraordinary in their communities.

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